Cry Another Beloved Country

Ronnie Miller

Indeed I live in the dark ages!

A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens

A hard heart. He who laughs

Has not yet heard

The terrible tidings.

(From Posterity by Bertolt Brecht)

I

The sound of silence

Ah, what an age it is

When to speak of trees is almost a crime

For it is a kind of silence about injustice!

And he who walks calmly across the street,

Is he not out of reach of his friends

In trouble?

(From Posterity by Bertolt Brecht)

Today, as is well known, South Africa leads the world in its  condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice. While the anti-Israel policies of the main political party (ANC) certainly predate the October 7th atrocities and have their roots in affiliations with the PLO, IRA, and the anti-Zionism propagated by the Soviet Union, what I did not expect is that since the atrocities on October 7th virtually every news outlet including newspapers, television, and of course social media, many  of which are vocal opponents of the ANC, have supported the Genocide claims of the Government. For the past two years we have been flooded with pictures of the devastation in Gaza. In an article in The Times of Israel (September 7, 2025) entitled “Our season of reckoning: Israel’s moral crossroads in Gaza”, Yossi Klein Halevi used the term “ambivalent Jew” which may be true for many of us but for me is not quite accurate because ambivalence suggests a measured calm whereas I am deeply agitated and conflicted to my Jewish core. I have an inner voice that refuses to stay silent, keeping me awake night after night struggling to come to terms with a close encounter of a kind that doesn’t let go.

In the above mentioned article, Yossi Klein Halevi speaks of a “moral reckoning” and that “something has gone very wrong in Gaza”. He highlights the hunger crisis, war crimes, Gaza’s ruins, and civilian casualties. But in highlighting these issues that call for a moral reckoning, he joins the chorus of deafening silence that doesn’t have a name but that since ancient times has been called barbaric.

There is a well-known story attributed to Golda Meir in 1969 at a London Press Conference where she said something along these lines: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our sons but it will be harder to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” What would she say today about the killing of untold numbers of Gazan children, numbers that even the IDF have now confirmed? However we may try to minimize/rationalize the extent of the horror in Gaza, the inescapable fact remains that not tens or hundreds but thousands of children, real innocent children, not including young combatants, have been killed, wounded, and left homeless without parents to care for them, schools to teach them, hospitals to cure them, mosques to comfort them. The claim that there are no innocents in Gaza must rank as the most revolting comment to escape a Jewish mouth when children are the very incarnation of innocence. Of course, I certainly recognize the outsized role of Hamas in the death and destruction in Gaza and its use of civilians, including children, as human shields operating from schools, hospitals, mosques and other civilian places. I also fully understand and appreciate the extent of the trauma experienced by Israelis following the vicious Hamas attacks. But I resist the claim that “the devil made me do it.” This creates a moral equivalence between us and them. Does this mean that the only conceivable way to prevent a repetition of October 7th is to reduce Gaza to rubble and in the process commit a heinous crime against the children of Gaza?

In his interview, Halevi insists that he, like many others, “knows” that no genocide has been committed in Gaza. The problem with this kind of “knowing” is that it hands the baton to the other side who, with the same sense of self-assurance, claims the opposite. I don’t know if what has happened in Gaza is or isn’t genocide. What I do know (and I think the South Africans who brought the charge also know) is that in a sense it doesn’t matter what the court will eventually decide; not because the court’s decision will change anyone’s mind – in Israel or South Africa - but because the charge, on its own, places Israel on the wrong footing having to justify its undeniable actions (that Halevi lists) relying not on its conduct but the slippery legal concept of intention. When you displace hundreds of thousands of people to a place of “safety” devoid of virtually any living facilities, in order to attack Hamas, and in the process destroy their homes this is not the same as killing them in gas chambers. But it is also not something that qualifies the army doing the displacing and the bombing to claim the accolade of the most humane army in the world. Increasingly, this claim is tainted  given the overt and covert role of the IDF in its governance of the West Bank: overt in its daily treatment of Palestinians;  covert in its failure to protect the people it governs from vicious and criminal actions by Jewish Terrorists. So yes, something has gone very wrong in Gaza (and the West Bank) and we can quibble about what label we use to call it but to use the word of Yuval Harari a “stain” (I don’t recall if Harari said indelible but I will say it) now pollutes our history. In this sense, the South African Government, with its long standing support of the Palestinian cause and antipathy to Israel, pulled off a master stroke branding the crime of crimes on the Jewish State, itself established on the human ashes of the Shoah.

I know that I have posed a rhetorical question about how Israel can legitimately defend itself against the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran intent on its destruction without losing its moral compass. The lesson of October 7th is that walls of iron are only ever temporary and what we learn from history is that Sparta slowly faded away and so too apartheid South Africa. But the overriding lesson of history is that denying others the rights we enjoy by the exercise of force has never ever been sustained. And at the heart of Judaism is the well-known one-legged utterance of Hillel (“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour”) that ends: “Go and learn.” The tragedy of Zionism today is that it has developed a learning problem - a dyslexia - that renders the writing on the wall of history opaque.

Of the many articles and podcasts over the past two years one, “In the Rush to Move On Who Will Make Israel Face its Moral Failures” by Eran Rolnik (Haaretz, October 18, 2025), poses a similar question to Halevi and speaks about a “New Israel”. He reminds us of the talk about the “New Germany” following the Shoah and the need for a “New Israel”.

“But, like ‘the other Germany’ after 1945, this ‘other Israel’ had its genesis not only in the recent catastrophe of October 7, and not even in the struggle against attempts to effect a regime coup, but from a cumulative experience of denying loss. Israeli society is prepared to process the failures of October 7 in technical terms – military intelligence, army, logistics – yet resists confronting its own profound and enduring moral blindness; the habit of occupation as a way of life, the blindness to the legitimate right of another people to the Promised Land, the denial of indiscriminate destruction and vengeance perpetuated killing in the Gaza Strip, and the withering empathy vis-à-vis the suffering of others.”

Rolnik refers to an inner voice that is in danger of falling silent. This is precisely the voice of shame and doubt that I can’t silence deep within myself persistently asking, “If you were 18 now ….?”

II 

Yesterday

I came among men in a time of uprising

And I revolted with them.

So the time passed away

Which on earth was given me.

(From Posterity by Bertolt Brecht)

When we were 18, thriving in Habonim, oblivious of a people called Palestinians and vaguely aware of Arabs, some resident In Israel (under military rule) and some refugees who had “elected” to flee across the border in the hope of a victory by the attacking Arab armies, we were fed a diet of fact and fiction, exemplified in the movie Exodus that we, in turn, regurgitated to the next generation. The new historians were nowhere in sight to challenge our received wisdom. Into this mix other ingredients were added closer to home and our actual lived realities; the ravages of apartheid, on the one hand, and the shadow of the Shoah, on the other, together with either the fear or experience of antisemitism. Coming of age in Habonim, we were confronted with a particular blend of Zionism qualified by the term “labour” itself a socialist ideology grounded in the ideal of the dignity of labour as exemplified by the communal life of the Kibbutz. Intellectually we were split down the middle with, of course, individuals assigning different weights to each component but for many, if not most, the socialist/human rights and Zionism ingredients were evenly balanced and also mutually supportive.

Our origin myths/beliefs, imbibed as cultural nourishment and fertilized in Habonim, are an entangled knot of monotheism, slavery, emancipation, homeless wandering bound by a code of ethics culminating in a promise of a place to call our own. This place, whose title deeds were lodged in heaven, survived in our hands for roughly a millennium with various geographical configurations and names. It was a tapestry embroidered with Kings, Priests, Prophets, Temples, Mountains, Rivers, Plains, Deserts, Towns, Villages, Castles, Armies, Slings, Arrows, Shepherds, Milk, and Honey. This period of home-fullness ended at the hands of the Romans and thus began a transformation wrought by ceaseless wandering for two millennia with periodic expulsions providing a blueprint for what today we call ethnic cleansing that culminated in the industrial slaughter of the Shoah that bequeathed to the world the concept of “genocide”. For Jews, history doesn’t rhyme, it jars in a sinister repetitive way.

Whether we or others like it, or not, this birth and passage of our peoplehood is baked into the DNA of our ancestral memory. The condensed and potted version above does not capture the depth or density of this legacy that grounds our Jewish identity. This is the missing piece or hollow core of post-colonial settler accounts of Zionism in which square conceptual pegs are squeezed into selected genealogical round holes as illustrated in the following passage written by Mahmood Mamdani in a chapter on Israel in his book “Neither settler nor native” (2020, p. 256).

“The purpose of Zionism is precisely to make this translation: to make the experience of being Jewish—historically a matter of religious practice, upbringing, and lineage—into an experience of nationhood, and to tie this nation to a state.”

What is remarkable about this passage, that punches far above its weight in spilt ink, is that it masquerades as an innocent statement of bland fact and one that certainly fuels the dominant and pervasive anti-Zionist sentiment in South Africa and elsewhere. The hidden or perhaps deep structure of this sentence is what Freud and more recently Alenka Zupancic call “disavowal”; a denial (the Jews are not a people) and an affirmation (the Jews are a religion), wrapped  together in a package with the latter providing a buttress for the former. Unpacking the contents to assemble the structure, the components are Jews, history, religion , nationhood, State and a pot of devious Zionist glue. The historical experience of being Jewish, it is asserted, was a religious domestic matter devoid of nationhood that was transformed into a spanking new experience that felt like manna from a Zionist heaven “translating” a community of religious believers/practitioners into a nation seeking statehood. So, if nationhood is actually a hoodwink, something imposed from without rather than something intrinsic from deep within the historical experience or effective consciousness of a ”people” then it follows that, not only claims to statehood, but the delinquent state itself is irredeemably illegitimate. Mamdani’s assault is not only a matter of “misrecognition” of the Jewish “other” but is sheer “epistemological violence” or in plain language denying people the prerogative to define and constitute their own historical identity, by diluting three millennia of their living memory into a husk of his choosing. The irony beggars belief. The Post-Colonial scholar violates the very practice he not only condemns but that serves as the centrepiece of his discipline’s moral outrage.

III

 TODAY

Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.

There was little I could do. But without me

The rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.

So the time passed away

Which on earth was given me.

(From Posterity by Bertolt Brecht)

By invoking our cultural legacy, my intention is not to insist that it is somehow the property of each and every Jewish person or that it is equally distributed as an essential component of “Jewish consciousness”. Clearly, there are Jews for whom this legacy has little meaning or is marginal to their identity. That is their absolute right as it is for those who choose differently. Also, it is not my intention to suggest, let alone claim, that our historical legacy provides a political or legal claim to land ownership to the detriment of others with equally valid entitlement to the land. What I am suggesting is that way back then a notion took hold, less of a “house” and more of a “home” – of a dwelling place in the sense of belonging in a place where freedom and autonomy were not conditional on the whims of a “Master” but taken for granted.

In this sense, Jews through the passage of history have never been “homeless” despite their landless diasporic condition. This split, between the shifting sands under our feet and the cherished home of our memory, faithfully recalled in our prayers and celebrated in our stories and festivals, lay at the heart of the wretched Jewish condition through to the catastrophic events of the 20^th century. Of course, it is possible to reduce Jewishness to a set of abstract “Tikun Olam” principles and religious observance and, in the process, to reduce geography to a collection of place markers and history to one damned begetting after another. But when people celebrate festivals, however minimally, enact rituals, and recount stories from the past (Haggadah) then geography is enlivened and history emerges from below. It is in the enactment of memory – doing and telling – that the past is recovered in the present. (This is what Gadamer called the fusion of horizons or effective historical consciousness in which tradition flies under the radar blending with our ongoing consciousness.)

The saying that the Jews are the people of the book doesn’t only carry a religious but also a narrative meaning of storytelling and these stories are not only sacred but also sensually profane. (Notice the implicit assumption in the use of the word “people”.) Of course, we all live in a world, into which we are thrown, but there is also a world that lives in us, a distinction that is sometimes forgotten or ignored or relegated to separate disciplinary silos. The role of this inner world is contested (Hannah Arendt, Mahmood Mamdani) but emerges full blown in theorists like Du Bois (double consciousness), Franz Fanon (the new man), and Steve Biko (black consciousness). What is seldom acknowledged, especially in Post-Colonial Studies, is that Zionism was an early Jewish precursor in the consciousness stakes, not the whole of the Zionist story by any means, but certainly a potent component of Jabotinsky’s concept of “Hadar” and, in Labour Zionism, in which working the soil was a performative negation of the gaze of the Other, in whose eyes Jews were seen as parasites disconnected from productive labour.

In our wildest dreams we never imagined the world we now find ourselves living in where old words have acquired new meanings and new words challenge us in uncomfortable ways. Who would have thought that Israel would replace South Africa as the pariah of the world; where the despair of South Africans in the 1980s would find expression in the Israel of the 2020s; that Israel would inherit the Apartheid mantel; and above all that openly fascist and racist Israeli politicians would serve as senior cabinet ministers. Where does this leave “Zionism”? We know about the bitter feuds in the past between Zionists and Bundists who were ardent anti-Zionists. But today anti-Zionism has acquired a new spurt of growth from within and without, mainly driven by the academic field of Post-Colonial Studies. Zionism has always been a contested term but in adopting it as a badge today what are we attesting to? There isn’t  a word elastic enough to hold me and the likes of Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben Gvir, among many others, in its semantic grasp. At the heart of this crisis of Zionism lies not a Jewish question but a Palestinian unanswered question, the perennial unresolved Achilles heel of the Zionist movement in which moral and political issues abound.

IV 

TOMORROW

Alas, we

Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness

Could not ourselves be kind.

(From Posterity by Bertolt Brecht)

In a recent podcast, Yossi Klein Halevi voiced his dilemma by saying that he has two fears: that there will be a Palestinian state and that there won’t be a Palestinian state. While I fully appreciate the security implications of rockets being fired at Ben Gurion airport, I believe that in the final analysis - and I mean final in the sense of inevitable - the world, including the US, will insist on sovereignty for the Palestinians in the same way that it rejected apartheid. But there are some compelling lessons we can draw from the transition in South Africa. The most obvious is that a peaceful resolution did occur that ten years earlier was thought inconceivable. Also, and now largely forgotten, something momentous happened. In 1992, during the transition in South Africa, a whites-only referendum was held asking if the negotiations for a new constitution should be pursued. In effect this was asking if whites were willing to surrender political power to the black majority. The result was an astounding “yes” by a little more than two-thirds of the voters. The moral of the story isn’t a “moral” one. It would be naïve to conclude that white South Africans saw the light of moral clarity and the error of their ways. Facing international isolation, sport, cultural, and academic boycotts, and an economy on its knees white South Africans got the message and made a rational choice. While the US still has Israel’s back, alarm bells are starting to ring. US support is not as uniform as it was with increasingly large generational gaps emerging regarding support for Israel. Although dismissed as political theatre, the recent widespread recognition of Palestine as a state is not an empty gesture. It points to a state of mind that signals which way the international winds are blowing. As we saw in South Africa, change has a way of starting slowly and ending in a rush. Last, but of overriding significance, is indeed a matter of the heart. If South Africans, especially black South Africans could, after hundreds of years under the yoke of colonialism including slavery, find a way of living  together in peace with their apartheid masters then I must believe that Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, can stop the killing, the violence, the hatred, from elements on both sides, that fuels this Semitic conflict.

There is a Zionist tradition that has always recognized that Eretz Yisrael  was never an empty country without a people. But this same tradition also believed and with good solid reason that the Jews had  indeed survived as a people without a land. This has always meant that the promised land must be shared by all who live in it (to paraphrase the preamble of the South African constitution). For me, to deny this is to negate the moral ground of my Zionism. But this denial of the possibility of sharing from the other side also means a negation, by those who regard us as alien invaders or colonial settlers, of our long and living narrative history in which memory compresses time and renders the past present. Yuval Harari captures this in his usual crisp penetrating way pointing out that when the British settlers in South Africa dug in the ground they never found inscriptions in English from 2000 years ago.

I am deliberately refraining from prescribing constitutional blueprints. Talk of a Two-State Solution that once was a concrete proposition now seems, at worse, fanciful, given the creeping invasion of Palestinian land and, at best, metaphorical expressing recognition of the rights and plights of an oppressed Palestinian people. A single democratic state proposal, devoid of any tradition or historical memory that few seem to endorse, ignores or evades the problem of two peoples claiming the same space as their homeland bringing our inner and outer worlds into tension. (From my admittedly distant perspective, I find the suggestions by Dahlia Scheindlin compelling – “Not two states, not one state: a new way out of disaster for Israelis and Palestinians”, Haaretz 30/11/2023). But certainly, those who live between the river and the sea and will inhabit whatever political structure emerges will have to be its architects. My claim is prior to any structural solution.  Although certainly contentious, I believe that the starting point for a resolution to this intractable conflict cannot be a discussion about which Jerusalem street will separate Israel and Palestine. Missing from this approach is what Levinas called “the face of the other” and South Africans call Ubuntu (I am because we are). As long as either side harbours dreams, above or below the discursive ground, of ethnic cleansing – Jews pushed into the Mediterranean sea and Palestinians cast in and among a sea of Arabs in surrounding lands – the bloody conflict will keep erupting. There is one hard concrete fact to focus the mind. These two proud and abused peoples have nowhere else to go, no other metropole or motherland other than this recently made unholy of lands.

Where does this leave Zionism? I find the concept of post-Zionism intellectually appealing given the nuances of its hyphenated semantic status. The prefix “post” indicates not a rejection, as does “anti-”, but a modification or overcoming (Aufhebung) of the original concept resulting in a better or more refined conception. There is something that smacks of redundancy in retaining a foundational term originally designed to express a dream when that dream having been realized is morphing into nightmares that are tearing the beloved country apart as well as the nation as a whole that it was intended to unify. For me, the term “Zionism”, despite its nostalgic associations, is unsettling. It has always been a contested concept. But there  is no denying that today some expressions of Zionism present an ugly spectacle projecting a nationalist fervour spinning out of control in ways that confirm Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber’s worst fears. As a concept, its limits are no longer stretched but broken when the word accommodates irreconcilable differences from liberal inclusive nationalism to illiberal exclusive ethnonationalism.  

At the same time, post-Zionism must not collapse into anti-Zionism. Anti-apartheid was not anti-South Africa; it sought to redeem the country by dismantling injustice. Anti-Zionism, however, cannot avoid being anti-Israel, because Zionism is not merely a policy but the historical vehicle through which Jewish self-determination took political form. To call for the dissolution of that statehood — however flawed its present expression — is not reform but erasure of a people whose sovereignty emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz. But this does not in any way insulate Israel against legitimate and vigorous full-throated criticism as frequently voiced by Ehud Olmert, a previous Israeli Prime Minister.

There are a number of wars ranging at the present time in Europe and Africa but only one has lodged itself so deeply under the surface of my skin. My defence in writing about these issues is to signal solidarity with my friends in Israel who have been traumatised in mind and body (ideas, values, politics, war, sirens, bomb shelters, rockets, missiles, hostages) and to show that I too care. I care that somehow on the long road from then to now our Zionism has become lame as we have lost the compassionate human rights leg that Habonim instilled in our youthful minds.

Thank you for reading my thoughts and comments. We sometimes write to clear and tidy our minds but also to heal the heart and clear off the chest. I’ve said my piece, the tower beckons.

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